"bad deal" better than "no deal"?

“No deal is better
than bad deal:” that’s the mantra that has been heardad
nauseamin the recent
past when referring to the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.

But
is it really so? Of course, everybody knows what “no deal” means. It is more
difficult to discern at what point a deal becomes bad, rather than good, or
even average. But plenty of experts are ready to help. A bad deal, they tell
us, is a deal which would allow the Iranians to produce the material necessary
for a bomb in less than six months. A bad deal is a deal which would not
clarify once and for all what kind of research the Iranians have been pursuing
in the past for manufacturing a nuclear explosive device. A bad deal is a deal
which would allow the Iranians to pursue their ballistic missile program. And
so on… One ends up understanding that any deal less than perfect would amount
to an unacceptably bad deal.

But
such an approach goes against any diplomatic process in which compromise and
give and take are key notions. It leads to the conclusion that a perfect deal
is a deal which does not have to be negotiated, a deal in which the winner
takes all. And indeed, there are people who believe that non-proliferation is
too important a question to be submitted to any kind of compromise. It deserves
only perfect deals.

History,
though, does not confirm this approach. The mother of all non-proliferation
agreements, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), concluded in 1968, was in each
and all its articles one big compromise. A few countries were allowed to
develop nuclear arsenals, others not. The countries that agreed to forsake any
military nuclear ambitions were allowed to bring their nuclear capabilities up to
the thin red line beyond which could start the manufacturing of an explosive
nuclear device. Nobody was happy at the result when the Treaty was signed and
nobody is satisfied today by the state of affairs that has developed since.

Thus,
the NPT was a deeply imperfect agreement, and indeed, a kind of bad deal. But
would a “no deal” have been better? Obviously not. In a different field, the
strategic arms limitation agreements concluded during and after the Cold War
between the US and the USSR, later on Russia, and signed on the US side by
Presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Obama… were certainly
deeply imperfect. But, again, would “no deals” have been better?

Considering
the Iranian negotiation, one could risk being provocative by saying that almost
any deal (at least in the ambit of the current negotiation) could be better
than no deal at all. No deal means the unchecked development of the Iranian
program, the continuing increase of its enrichment capacities and stock of
enriched uranium, the completion of a reactor of the plutonium-production type,
and eventually the resumption of active research on engineering a nuclear
device. By way of consequence, it would mean a growing tension between the
international community and the Islamic Republic, possibly culminating in
strikes on its nuclear facilities and in armed confrontation.

Compared
to such a prospect, a far less-than-perfect agreement could appear indeed as
highly desirable. Let us remember that international relations are nurtured by
iterative and evolutionary processes. “Solve-all”, perfectly designed
agreements, the epitome of which could well have been the Treaty of Versailles,
seldom produce brilliant and lasting results. What is critical is to grab at
the right moment the maximum of what is within reach. The art of diplomacy lies
precisely in the ability to first discern, and then to join and knit together
the extremes of what can be willingly accepted by the conflicting parties. It
incorporates also the humility of leaving to others the task of solving at a
later stage questions not yet fully addressed or wholly answered, in the
knowledge that new circumstances created by an agreement will create new
possibilities for progress. It keeps in mind that even an imperfect agreement,
if faithfully implemented by the parties, can be a kind of confidence-building
machine, opening the way to further advances. This is precisely what happened
with the November 24 Joint Plan of Action between the P5+1 and Iran: that
accord was transitory and therefore essentially imperfect, but it created the
proper atmosphere for a more ambitious step forward.

Given
the current state of the negotiations, how can these general considerations be
translated into concrete terms? Let us limit ourselves to the most difficult
point; that is, the acceptable level of Iranian enrichment activities. Here,
the obvious line of compromise turns around capping them for a few years at the
present level of employed enrichment capacity – expressed in Separation Work
Units (SWU) in order neutralize the consequences of the possible introduction
of more efficient centrifuges. The figure to be retained would then be between
8,000 and 10,000 SWU per year.

For
this, the Iranians have to admit that they do not need to develop an enrichment
capacity on an industrial scale (about 50,000 SWU per year and over) as long as
the main structures of their future nuclear power plants do not rise from the
ground. And they should take advantage of this interval to develop more
productive and more secure centrifuges than the primitive, outdated model that
forms the bulk of their present stock of working centrifuges. They also need to
progress significantly in the technology of nuclear-fuel manufacturing in order
to be ready in due time if they want to meet at least partially the needs of
their future nuclear power plants.

On
the other side, the West should consider the enormous political difficulty the
Iranian government would face if it had to dismantle even part of the nation’s
hard-won enrichment capacity. It is true that accepting the preservation of
this capacity at its present level would open the theoretical risk of the
Iranians quickly acquiring significant quantities of highly enriched uranium,
thus opening the way to the bomb. But considering the self-destructive
consequences of such a blatant breach of agreement, the risk is very limited
indeed, and by all means much more limited than the risks raised by the absence
of any deal. Is this risk really unmanageable for the coalition of the world’s
most powerful countries, given the sophistication of their diplomatic,
intelligence, and contingency-planning capacities? Of course, such a compromise
could be easily depicted with equal vehemence as a bad deal on both sides. And
that is why it is probably the right compromise, and indeed a fair deal.